Introduction: Re-sacralizing the Social: Spiritual Kinship at the Crossroads of the Abrahamic Religions
This introduction examines the significance of spiritual kinship, or kinship reckoned in relation to the divine, in creating myriad forms of affiliations between and among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Rather than confining the study of spiritual kinship
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Introduction: Re-sacralizing the Social: Spiritual Kinship at the Crossroads of the Abrahamic Religions Todne Thomas, Rose Wellman, and Asiya Malik
In March 2014, we convened a Wenner-Gren Workshop, “The Sacred Social: Investigations of Spiritual Kinship among the Abrahamic Faiths,” at the University of Virginia. As organizers, our aim was to rethink spiritual kinship’s analytical enclosure within the study of godparenthood and reemploy the concept in current debates about secularism, modernity, and
T. Thomas (*) Department of Religion, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA R. Wellman The Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA A. Malik Independent Researcher, Toronto, Canada
© The Author(s) 2017 T. Thomas et al. (eds.), New Directions in Spiritual Kinship, Contemporary Anthropology of Religion, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_1
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religious sociality. Focusing our attention on the religious practitioners of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, we asked workshop participants to consider how and to what extent spiritual relations, writ large, shape families, communities, nations, and transnational religious networks. Given the Abrahamic focus, we also challenged our colleagues to consider what it means for religions to be related. Participants enthusiastically explored how the connections between the sacred and the social forge relations of inclusion and exclusion, as well as equality and hierarchy, across practitioners’ social worlds. Together we considered how naturalized identities such as biogenetic relationships, gender, and ethnicity/race interact with these sacralized identities. We further investigated how spiritual kinship organizes political affiliations, social networks, and moral orders across domains and scales. Our workshop proceedings led to critical discussions of the Christian centrism implicit in the field of spiritual kinship studies and the need to move beyond the confines of the spiritual to explore a broader landscape of the idioms, ethics, processes, and actions that make religious kinship. New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties Across the Abrahamic Religions is the product of these conversations and debates. We consider the significance of spiritual kinship, or kinship reckoned in relation to the divine, in creating myriad forms of affiliations among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Traditionally, anthropologists have operated with a narrow, biologically based definition of kinship that conceptualizes spiritually based kinship as “fictive” or “pseudo” and opposes these relations to “real,” “natural,” or “biological” kinship. In such scholarship, spiritual kinship, commonly equated with godparenthood, is defined in radical opposition to “natural” or “carnal” kinship (Alfani and Gourdon 2012) and is therefore conceived as a minor field of inquiry within kinship studies. In contrast, New Directions in Spiritual Kinship draws from recent investigations in feminist and kinship studies
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